VitaShell 1.6 released – USB storage support on PSTV!

Yes, the day that many of us have been waiting for is finally with us! VitaShell 1.6, by the legendary developer ‘TheFlow’, has been released. TheFlow just can’t stop developing stuff for the Vita community.. he’s on a roll.

What’s VitaShell?

VitaShell is the most basic and well-known homebrew for the PSVita. It’s bundled with HENkaku but it started its life in the Rejuvinate days so it’s had quite a few hours of development time on it. VitaShell is a file manager which has multiple features but its developer has added some amazing features to it such as allowing the Vita to be used as a mass storage device when connected to a computer and now USB mass storage support on the PSTV/Vita TV.

What’s new?

Most people know the biggest new feature but you may miss some. This is the list:

You may now mount a USB mass storage device (pendrive/external HDD) to your PSTV/Vita TV via USB and use it as ux0! This allows you to avoid buying an expensive Vita memory card.

You can mount game carts as USB devices

Long file names now scroll

An option to refresh LiveArea has been added

Sort By option added

Various bug fixes

A theme selector

‘Electron’ theme by Acemad, who won TheFlow’s contest is now a part of VitaShell

As you can see, it’s quite a big update, even for PSVita owners. A word about USB mass storage devices and the PSTV: Not all devices may work due to power requirements! Some external hard drives may require a powered USB hub!

Electron: The built-in theme

Conclusion

This is quite a big release and you should get it immediately by updating from your VitaShell app. If you can’t, follow the link to download it from GitHub. It’s unsafe so don’t trust other sources. Congrats ‘TheFlow’ for your hard work and ‘Acemad’ for the great theme!

P.S: USB SUPPORT ON THE PSTV HAS JUST BEEN RELEASED SO EXPECT ISSUES. BE CIVIL AND REPORT TO ‘THEFLOW’ IF YOU ENCOUTER ISSUES.

I'm a girl that's liked technology from day 1. Mostly interested in the PSVita/PSP scene but I've always modded my stuff when it's possible, that is :)Contact me via DM at @KawaiiAuroraA on Twitter if you have any questions/concerns about my articles or if you have any article requests.

Is there a difference in loading times when comparing loading a game off Sony’s proprietary memory card to the speed from loading a game off a pendrive/flash drive? Please post a video doing that with a 3GB+ Vita game like Helldivers on youtube and let us know.

It has pretty same speed with the memory card speed around 8mb/s in my netbook(i copied ciel no surge offline to my pc just for testing the game has 10000 files so it’s good for testing the speed). and for loading time it’s not that noticeable tbh. it’s just a few second slower than loading game from memory card 1 second at most.

What about it? The PSVita does not have a USB output, while the PSTV does. I mean, the closest thing to a USB output that the Vita has is that Mystery port, but there is no way to use it if the current firmware does not activate that port. The only thing the Vita audience can hope for is a microSD adapter for the handheld, if we want to get rid of sony’s *** prop ***, that is.

I found that it is likely 3 reasons: You went straight to 1.60 You were using an outdated version of Vitashell older than 1.5/1.51 Something sc*** up in your previous version of Vitashell

The solution for me was to delete the 1.6 vitashell, and incrementally install 1.5 using molecular shell. open, then update to 1.51, open and close it, then finally install 1.6. once I did this, it worked fine for me.

Maybe there would be a way some day to either use the charging cable port for mass storage or the actual Game port to use regular SD cards with the vita to expand the standard PSV’s memory. I hope someone like TheFL0w would look into this possibility and would definitly make the PSV an awesome handheld of all time.

“Not all devices may work due to power requirements! Some external hard drives may require a powered USB hub!” If all you want to plug in is a hard drive that doesn’t get enough power to spin up properly I’d likely go with a y-cable and a spare phone charger, a bit lower profile I think. A hub is useful if you want to charge your controller at the same time or have a wired only controller (whether it be one with a battery that doesn’t hold a charge, one of the third party wireless ones that use a dongle, or one that’s actually designed to be wired only). I can confirm that using a hub in passive mode works with the combination of a flash drive, a crossover gaming device, and a third party wireless dongled controller, though only with the hub plugged directly into the PSTV, did not work with the hub plugged into the USB extender cable I had plugged into the PSTV before

I am planning on picking up a new flashdrive for my vita tv (all the old ones are full or not very large), and i cant remember does the vita tv use usb 3.0 or 2.0 im pretty sure its 2.0 but i wanted to make sure…. Thanks.

You won’t see the speed boost on the PTSV, but when you turn off the PSTV and transfer your games on the PC (which is another benefit of this mod), if you have usb 3 on your PC, you will benefit from the extra speed in transfer time.

I was able to transfer almost 16GB of content in a few seconds, and I still have plenty more to go.

when I mounted my usb stick it created a few files such as “SceloTrash” and “System Volume Information”. Basically I copied every file that was on ux0 to my usb stick except for the ones that were already created automatically on the usb (for example SceloTrash). Once I did that, I had to restart the vita tv and then everything worked. Now I can install VPKs to my usb stick and everything just works!

The Vita is using the exfat filesystem for its storage and not a FAT32 file system. Although Im not sure why it would cause the problems you are having. You better report that to “TheFlow” because if what your telling us is true. That is some MAJOR problem.

Well it´s a great release, today i will make my mod, i will rip off a PSV power/USB cable, and attach at an OTG cable to receive a flashdrive on my PSV, i hope it works on my commom PSV, i think it´s can be possible since i will make a generic USB door on my PSV.

YOu should include the instructions on how to use it. Cuz its *** confusing. and not to *** mention i cant find that info anywhere online. except 2 places. a site that you guys say dont *** visit and the flows official page “https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/VitaShell” just got to scroll down a bit.

For anyone including the above guy…. How to use an USB flash drive as Memory Card on a PS TV

Format your USB flash drive as exFAT or FAT32. Launch VitaShell and press /\ in the ‘home’ section. Select ‘Mount uma0:’ and attach your USB flash drive. You can now copy stuff from/to your USB stick. Once ‘uma0:’ is listed under the partitions, press /\ again and choose ‘Mount USB ux0:’. This will copy important apps like VitaShell, molecularShell, and other files. Your USB flash drive is now acting as a Memory Card. To sync all your apps on your USB flash drive, press /\ and choose ‘Refresh livearea’. This will NOT refresh PSP games. If you wish to revert the patch, press /\ and select ‘Umount USB ux0:’. Note that this patch is only temporary and you need to redo the procedure everytime you launch your PS TV.

Even though this is such a great release, I think all it needs to make it even better is to implement this change (mounting a USB device at PS TV’s startup via a custom FW and load stuff from there) into the system instead of making it rely on a hack that needs to be started, otherwise it will render this functionality useless. For example, for some reason I cannot start my hack anymore using the browser trick (I’m still on 3.60 BTW) – the browser just outputs C2-1282828-1 error code and that’s it. Using the Vita’s workaround is impossible because it requires to turn off Wifi in order to delete the browser’s cache and history, but there’s no way I can turn it off on PS TV. If I somehow manage to make Henkaku work again, I might as well install the offline hack and see how it goes…

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